Since August, the spicy-sweet dipping and pasta sauce has been packaged in 16-ounce high grade plastic containers with sealed screw-top lids that do not require immediate refrigeration. That means, for the first time, it can be shipped.

Now, after a few months of test marketing, it's available online, at hotTom.com. Each jar sells for $6.99.

"Getting it in a container that does not require refrigeration is a huge step," said Pasta's owner Karyn Korteling, who has been dreaming of the day she could package and ship the tomato oil since it soared to local popularity more than 20 years ago. "We can ship it; you can keep it your car for the afternoon; you buy quantities to give to your friends."

"The buzz is out there for this product," Korteling said. "We expect to ship a lot to people out of town."

Korteling and her late husband and Pasta's co-founder, Patrick Heagerty, devised the tomato oil with their kitchen staff after they returned from a 1989 trip to Italy, where they had a version of it at a roadside restaurant.

Korteling describes the oil they wanted to mimic as having a "sublime sweetness" along with the fiery spice.

The tomato oil started out as a pasta sauce at the restaurant, 311 S. Franklin St. in Armory Square. Later, it developed into a pre-meal dip with Pasta's equally famous Italian stretch bread.

"We couldn't stop the staff from eating it that way, so we just put it out there," Korteling said.

For several years, the restaurant kitchen made extra tomato oil and packaged it in plastic containers (lidded but unsealed), to be sold at Pasta's Daily Bread, its bakery and shop across Franklin Street.

The production of the sauce soon began to overwhelm the kitchen. It produces more than 150 gallons a week for the restaurant alone.

"It was taking over," Korteling said. "It was a good problem to have."

Rather than build an auxilliary kitchen, Korteling said she searched for a long time to find a manufacturer who would create the sauce for packaging without changing from the restaurant version.

"They agreed to do it exactly the way we do, the exact ingredients and everything -- nothing artificial," she said.

The tomato oil is now made and packaged there, and sent back to Syracuse for shipping. The new packagaes have had a soft roll-out at the restaurant and bakery store since the late summer. (The oil served at the restaurant is still made in its kitchen).

Korteling said distribution through grocery stores could be the next step.

Korteling said she chose the high-grade plastic instead of glass because the container is reusable -- it's washable and has a label that, she says, comes off easily.

The label, by the way, may contain some of the long-held secrets of the Spicy Hot Tomato Oil. Korteling, in the past, has been reluctant to share the ingredients, beyond tomatoes and garlic.